But the other insisted so convincingly that Hastings looked at him once more with confidence.
“The truth,” she said sadly, “is only for those who have faith; you—you prefer the sinner, whom you may crush into a penitent. Your egotism demands the power to forgive; you have not the courage to love.”
The stranger took a step nearer her, but she was looking at Hastings.
“He is the only one who is worthy to believe me—he, whom you blame me for loving. I do love him, then, but with a love no codes of yours can understand. For I am innocent, to use the word by which you forgivingly call the unjustly accused.”
Hastings quailed beneath the bitterness of her irony; he saw, too, how the man who so resembled him fell back against an old calico bag, stuffed with remnants probably, that hung on a hook right behind where he had been standing; but when he faced her once more, he marveled at the change in her appearance.
Her brows were raised, contracted gently, resolutely; her eyes were yearningly fixed on Hastings; her lips were parted tenderly for the generous appeal she had at last found the need to make to him.
“Forgive me, O my husband!” she begged. “Nothing can come between us, nothing shall. But I could not love you as I do if I loved not others—if, for the chance love that came my way, I should give in exchange no thanks. You understand me? You would not have me avoid what I was made to love? You would not have me disregard the sunlight and the sea and the stars in the sky? Yes, it is true, my husband, I loved him. He said that my fingers on the spinet made into harmony all the discords of the day; he said that I wove them away, with the notes of birds and the sound of running brooks and the sighing of the wind, into patterns, as in the long winter evenings I could spin flax at my wheel. It made me happy to have him love me. It filled me with strength. It taught me many new things I could do for you. John, John, say that you forgive me?”
Though Hastings wanted to take her in his arms, he was impelled to turn away from her and to view that silent figure still leaning against the calico bag, whose head was lifted haughtily in deference to her supplication.
“He loved you, too,” she continued to Hastings, “because you loved me. He did not mean to kiss me.” She just raised her hands, as if involuntarily, and let them fall at her sides. “You thought that he was stealing me from you. He couldn’t; he can’t; and nobody can—now, nor ever. His kiss was as pure as the perfume of lilies, pressed close to breathe; it but made sweeter your love and mine, your life and mine.”
“Adulteress! With my curses go to him, then, forever!”